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Once again, the ignorance astounds me. I sincerely hope that either or both of this woman’s children turn out to be gay.

People unfortunately go through a lot of mental gymnastics to justify beliefs they have that aren’t exactly sound.

Unfortunately, some people’s minds will never be changed on an issue, something that 21-year-old Alabama photographer, Faith Grace, discovered the hard way after a pregnant woman who was interested in getting some maternity photos taken messaged her.

At first, everything seemed cool, but after the mom started looking at Grace’s social media accounts, she noticed something that troubled her: the young photographer was rocking an LGBT pride flag in her posts.

Apparently, the mother couldn’t bear the thought of having her pictures taken by someone with a different sexual orientation than her, so not only did she decline to do business with Grace, she sent her a text message letting her know that she specifically didn’t hire the young woman because she’s gay.

While I loathe to defend an homophobe’s ignorance, I think in this case it’s free speech. The engraving was done on his own fence and he merely put the reference to the verses; he didn’t spell out the text of each one. It’s a fine line to walk between free speech and hate speech.

The man, who has not been named, is believed to have done it after his neighbour Shaun Shaffer put up a number of rainbow flags.

Shaffer shares his house with three other gay men and wished to celebrate Pride month.

Shaffer explained that they heard the neighbour muttering after putting the flags up but they weren’t sure why.

“We just finished putting up the flags, and we were taking the recycling out, and we saw our neighbour up against his fence. We heard scratching. We couldn’t tell what he was doing. There was muttering,” Shaffer said.

When you live in an apartment complex, there are certain rules that everyone has to follow when it comes to the external presentation of the apartments. While some say it’s arranged that way to quell individuality, the reality is that it keeps uniformity among the units.

The rules are pretty lax, with people regularly putting up various decorations even outside of major holidays, but when the elections ended and an Imgurian that goes by the username RainbowGirl2016 hung a rainbow flag off of her porch in solidarity with the LGBTQ community that was undoubtedly going to face challenges ahead based on the now President-elect’s campaign promises.

With the stellar response of Mrs Pearlman’s neighbors, I daresay that the woman who found her flag so offensive isn’t a true neighbor, but was probably out for a walk and saw something she didn’t like. I love the passive-aggressive tone of the letter, too. Good to see neighbors still caring for one another. 🙂

Susan Pearlman lives in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. So she was surprised when the day after the election, she came home to find an anonymous letter from a neighbor saying that they were “deeply troubled” by the pride flag that Pearlman was flying outside her home.

The neighbor said in the letter that the flag, designed to look like an American flag but with rainbow stripes instead of the red and white, “overlooks so many things the original American flag represents.” The neighbor goes on to ask Pearlman not to take the flag down but to instead put an American flag next to it, side by side.